Lesbos. Better days for Moira

BETTER DAYS FOR MOIRA

Introduction

In early September 2015, an image changed the perception that the world had of the drama of refugees from the civil war in Syria. The Turkish photographer Nilüfer Demir found herself facing the body of a dead boy floating near the tourist beach of Bodrum. As police removed the body, the photographer took several shots coldly showing the bearer of an improper, unjust and unbearable death.

We are used to the constant trivialization of death and extreme pain by the fiction industry. But it is a consensual violence, accepted and conventional, while the body of a dead child lying on the ground is beyond acceptable convention. It is, in other words, a violent violence, which as a symbolic boundary of what would be accepted as understandable, has made ​​many people wonder how this could possibly have reached this point?

One of the many people in which this image aroused an inevitable feeling of empathy was the Chancellor Angela Merkel, who a few days later declared that Germany was prepared to welcome as many refugees as wanted to live there. That decision involuntarily provoked a calling effect and in the months that followed, eight hundred thousand people, piled by the mafia into overloaded boats, crossed the few kilometres from the Turkish coast to the nearest Greek islands. Many of them negotiated the channel separating Ayvacik from Lesbos. Four thousand drowned. Little Aylan Kurdi, was one among the many who lost their lives at sea, but the extreme solitude of the boy lying on the sand, had already gained a life of its own.